Kick-Off: First Rails 4 Application with HABTM Association

Its been a long time since I’ve not written a post. Now, I realize that it’s time to share some useful snippet with all of you.

Recently, I got a chance to get my hands cleaned with Rails 4. So much is happening around Rails community and with the rapid development of Rails 4, I was finding it bit difficult to keep my momentum going.

Well, leave all this apart. Now, by putting some extra efforts my system is ready with:

Ruby 2.1 & Rails 4.1

In order to start with my first Rails 4 Application, I took HABTM Association (weird, isn’t it?). It came randomly into my mind. However, I will dig into other associations as well with time, but to start with let’s take HABTM association with example.

I assume most of you are aware what changes Rails 4 has introduced. If you’re new to Rails 4 or would like to re-visit the changes, here’s the most useful link I’ve found. Just take a look.

Once you’re sure about changeset in Rails4, let’s draw an example:

Prerequisites:

Ruby 1.9.2+

Rails 4.1.0+

Traditional Database (MySQL/Postgres)

Key-Entities:

Person Model

Communtiy Model

A Join Table

Defining the Relationships & creating tables:

For rest of the code-flow (controllers, views) you can download the zip of the application from my GitHub page, run it on your local and see Rails4 HABTM in action.